WHAT WOULD ROBERT HEINLEIN DO? Cory Doctorow reviews John Varley’s Red Lightning and calls it “The book Robert Heinlein would have written about GW Bush’s America.”

Tensor, on the other hand, looks at Heinlein’s actual wartime correspondence and thinks Doctorow is wrong: “I’m not sure whether the law Heinlein wrote about is still on the books (I hope not), and my purpose is not to accuse Doctorow of somehow damaging the morale of active-duty military personnel. I mean only to point out that Heinlein circa 1942 seemed perfectly comfortable with a law ‘specifically intended…to restrict the freedom of speech of civilians in wartime,’ a law far more directly restrictive of civil liberties than any part of the Patriot Act. What’s more, Heinlein apparently supported this law strongly enough to admonish a friend in private correspondence not to break it.”

He concludes: “Trying to posthumously enlist Heinlein (or any dead author for that matter) in some modern political cause strikes me as a dubious enterprise.”

I think that’s right, though it’s often an almost irresistibly tempting one. At any rate, I’ve read Red Lightning, and regardless of the Bush point (which is strained, but at least somewhat plausible) it is an excellent Heinlein-style junior novel, the sort of “entry-level science fiction” that John Scalzi is always calling for more of.